


12%

by quigonejinn



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 10:52:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> Your best friend finds you in the desert; your girl meets you on the tarmac, smiling through tears.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	12%

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS NOT A FIC ABOUT HAPPY FLUFFY UNICORNS. I'VE PUT THIS WARNING ON OTHER FICS BEFORE, AND SOME PEOPLE ARE STILL SURPRISED WHEN UNHAPPY UNFLUFFY NONUNICORNS SHOW UP, SO I'M TRYING ALL CAPS.
> 
> SEE THE "AUTHOR CHOOSES NOT TO WARN"?
> 
> IT IS THERE FOR A REASON. THE REASON IS THAT UPSETTING THINGS MAY OR MAY NOT HAPPEN IN THIS FIC.

When you are thirty-six, you go to Afghanistan. You think it will be pop-in, pop-out, wheels-up, back in LA before sundown. Easy.

It isn't. 

...

When you are thirty-six, you go to Afghanistan, thinking it will be easy. Instead, you come back three months later with a light in your chest. Your best friend finds you in the desert; your girl meets you on the tarmac, smiling through tears. She has freckles; she is wearing a gray suit and little kitten heels because she remembered that you don't like being nine inches shorter than her: a month later, she has both hands inside your chest cavity, swapping out your night light, almost sending you into cardiac arrest. She is terrified and angry and freaked-out, and you look her in the eye and tell her that you trust her more than you trust anyone else. 

You love her so much. 

Sometimes, at night, when you close your eyes, you're back on the tarmac with the sound of jets coming in for landing, looking at the little wisps of hair that escaped her ponytail and are blowing around her face in the hot, dry air. She doesn't know whether to laugh or go on crying, so she gives you this smile that is mostly her lips twitching and her eyes getting a little more teary. She doesn't trust herself to really smile because she'll really start crying. 

Seven months later, you're flying over the Indian Ocean, running dark except for the beacon that lets SHIELD follow with quinjets. 

What happened to your girl? 

...

Here is what happened to your best friend: after finding you in the desert, he finds you on the floor of your workshop. Good thing you blew out all the glass in a fit of rage; good thing he knows to come down to the basement. He is wearing a black leather jacket and his MIT class ring. 

_Where's Pepper_ , you ask, in your memories. 

_She's with some agents. They're going to arrest Obadiah._

Nine months later, you're drifting high up enough that helicopters and the island is a blur of gray and brown and the occasional dot of green. The helicopters clear out, and you ask, over the satellite line, whether they want you to engage. Romanov, in her bored voice, says that you're staying out of this. They want to see how it's going to play out. 

You do lazy barrel rolls while, in the wreckage of Harlem, Bruce Banner chokes what used to be Emil Blonsky with a length of chain. 

...

That isn't --

...

No, really, that is what happens with your best friend. He finds you in the desert in Afghanistan; he finds you on the floor of your workshop and helps you to the suit. Afterwards, he introduces you at a press conference. You're going to say a few words from a card about you were on a boat all night; there are twenty-five people who can say that you were there, and when you get up there next to Jim, you look down at the paper in your hand, then back out at the faces. 

You remember the last time you stood up here and made an announcement: Coulson is behind you, just off-camera. Rhodey is to your left, and you don't even get through all the words on the card. Instead, you choke out three or four words, turn around, and walk away: that night, you wake from a long dream of being back in Afghanistan. 

Yinsen is sitting on a sack of aid grain, right by the exit to the cave. His shirt is spattered with blood, but he is polishing his glasses on a piece of the hem that is clean. He looks up. 

"Is that what I saved you for? The great Tony Stark?" 

You wake, choked with tears. 

Jim Rhodes leaves you half a dozen voice mails before giving up: at least in this universe, he never has to testify against you in Congress. When a certain Senator starts making noises about convening a Senatorial subcommittee to ask questions about why, a few of SHIELD's friends on the Hill pay him a visit and remind him just how classified knowledge of the identity of Iron Man is. Does he remember? Do the words _national security_ mean anything to him? No? How about _base closure_? 

You never set up a second Stark Expo. You never go to Monaco for Formula 1 racing. Ivan Vanko stays in Russia, making weapons. You sleep on the Helicarrier and start working with the Tesseract. 

...

"Hold still."

"That hurts."

"You know what hurts more?" Natasha yanks your hand away from the neck and yanks your head back a little, so that she can get back to the skin above the collar of your undersuit. "Dying from radiation poisoning."

The first shot that she gives you to relieve the symptoms is gentle: a cool spray on the side of the neck, but it scales poorly. You're four shots in, but the dosage isn't just four times bigger. It isn't a cooling spray, either. Instead, it's a series of large needles being injected into you. Natasha says that in another two or three doses, they're going to start considering _alternate sites_ for injection, like the inside of your thigh or your abdomen. 

You re-discover vibranium, but for reasons besides making a radiation-proof shell for the arc reactor: it never occurs to you to try. After all, you're pretty sure you'll be dead by other means before the year is over. 

"What the hell is in those needles?" you ask, rubbing your neck.

"Variation of what they used to give me in Moscow," she answers and preps the next one. When she looks up and sees your expression, she laughs. 

...

Is it the knock-off of the Russian knock-off of the Super Soldier Serum that they put into you, so that you can continue to hold up under the arc reactor? Is it the amount of time that you spend in the suit with the face plate down?

One night, when you collapse with exhaustion at your workbench on the Helicarrier, you have a dream about Pepper. You're back in the Malibu house, and you've come into the main room in your suit. There is a hole in the ceiling from where you fell through, and Pepper had been sitting on the couch. She is wearing a white suit with ridiculous shoulders and had been looking at her phone, but puts it down when you pop the face plate. 

Stiffly, you walk over to her, then go down on your knees. You lay your head in her lap, and she strokes the top of your head. She strokes your shoulders, and you can feel it through the suit; you can feel it all the way down your back, into your stomach, putting warmth into parts of you that have felt dead for a long, long time. 

"I'm so tired," you say, and your voice shakes. "I miss you so much." 

"I don't have anyone else, Tony," she says. 

In the dream, you don't know what she means. You pull away to look at her in the face, and you see she is smiling a little. The front of her white suit is soaked in blood from collar to hip. 

"My chest hurts," she says, sounding surprised. 

You wake at your workshop desk in the Helicarrier, and you can't stop screaming. 

...

Here is what happened to your girl. 

After the tarmac, after the benefit, after Gulmira, she came down into the workshop and saw you sitting at the workbench. You told her that there wasn't anything else except for the mission, and she told you that she couldn't do this anymore. Then, she quit. She was going to leave and walk out of your life, but then, she looked down at the ghost drive: she picked it up, looked you in the eye, and said that she didn't have anyone else either. 

Then, she went to the office.

Then, she went into the arc reactor building and pushed the button because you told her to. 

The building crumbled, and a length of structural steel, a foot and a half across and at least a couple tons in weight, came down from the frame of the building. It went through Pepper from the crown of her head and didn't stop until most of the way through her torso. She was a bloody mess, barely enough to put into a body bag; you were dazed and only semi-conscious, but you've cracked the SHIELD files and looked at the morgue files. You've seen the photograph; there wasn't anything of a face left. There wasn't much of a torso left. 

"We're planning to say that she was on the plane."

"You're not going to say that."

"This isn't my first rodeo. It'll be more plausible if they were on the same plane. One accident. Multiple bodies." 

"I don't care. You're not going to say that she died next to Stane. She deserves better than that." 

Coulson considers you, and his voice is hard. "What do you want, Tony? A car accident? A mugger?" 

Natasha dabs face powder to cover the bruise on your cheek. 

...

You join SHIELD because you feel, obscurely, that you owe them for making Pepper's death be recorded as quiet and dignified. Died in her sleep. Previously undiagnosed heart condition. A simple cremation, and you don't ask SHIELD how they get a body so that the coroner signs the death certificate. Or do they just manufacture the death certificate? You aren't sure, but the third, fourth, and fifth voicemails that Rhodey leaves on your phone are him telling you the time of the cremation service and asking you to be there. Pepper doesn't have anyone else to help arrnage the cremation; some of the people in the office joined together and took care of it. _Here is the time_ , the voicemails say. _Here is the place. Tony, come on. Don't be a piece of shit._

The sixth voicemail says, _Tony, we both know what happened. You should have had the decency to come to the service. Don't bother to call unless you're calling to get the ashes._

You join SHIELD because you feel, obscurely, that you owe them for making Pepper's death quiet and decent. You also join SHIELD because you have nowhere else to go. Jim is safer if you aren't around; Yinsen would have had a better chance of surviving if you'd died on the operating table. Pepper would still be alive if you'd dehydrated in the desert or died on the couch, quietly, like you were supposed to. 

They dethaw Captain America, and you don't bother to mention that you're Howard Stark's son. He asks you about it, and through the headset, you tell him that Howard was a shitty father. You leave it at that and won't say another word about it. 

In fact, he doesn't even see you without the faceplate until after Coulson is dead. 

...

When high command sends the nuke into Manhattan, you grab hold over the East River and ride it vertical, up through the portal. You have a vague notion that Natasha is up on the roof with the trigger; if anybody can figure out how to close it, she'll figure it out. Just in case she doesn't, though, you've got a back-up plan. After all, when a nuke goes off, the actual explosion is only half of the released energy. There's thermal radiation. Ionizing radiation. All kinds of fun things that will, unless the mothership is very, very far away from the portal, in which case you're probably just going to blow in space -- all kinds of things that are going to rain down on Manhattan unless Natasha can get the portal closed.

That isn't a certain thing, though. 

So just before you go through, you activate a back-up plan. You've been working with the Tesseract for months, haven't you? 

...

You have a dream from which you don't wake up screaming, but you don't actually figure in it: Pepper and Yinsen are sitting together in the cave. It's cold, so Pepper is wrapped up in a blanket. She is wearing that white suit, except it doesn't have any blood. They're both sitting on crates, and they're playing sheshbesh on a shitty board balanced on a third crate. Bean stew is cooking over the fire. 

"Oh god, is that a four or a five? I can't tell. It sorta landed on the crease." Pepper frowns. 

"Which one is better for you?" Yinsen laughs and leans in, squinting.

"We can't play that way," Pepper sounds a little scandalized. "Come on. What's the rule?" 

Neither of them seem to see you or hear you or care about you, in any way. This is fair, you figure. 

...

You try to hang onto the bomb as long as you can, but the suit is keyed to your consciousness. 

...

You have a dream where you're back in the house in Malibu. You know you're in space, dying of cold and exposure and possibly radiation, but in your mind, you're back in the house. You haven't been back since an i-beam went through the top half of Pepper, and in your dreams, it shows. The house is cold. Dusty. One of the panes of the glass is broken, and you wrap your fist up with one of the runners from the hall table and bash the rest of it out, so that you can get out to the patio: without asking, you know that Jarvis can't open any more doors for you. 

Once you're out on the patio, you drop the fabric from around your fist. You walk out to the edge, next to the drained infinity pool, and you look at the ocean. You feel the sea breeze against your face, and you can feel the interstellar cold against your arms and legs and hands. How much longer do you have? Not much longer, but at least you managed to transport yourself and the bomb -- 

You start to fall backwards. 

There is a crackle of something that could be Tesseract energy. 

...

You had months with the Tesseract, and you messed around with it a little. You had your rule about not making more weapons, and SHIELD, by and large, respected that. To earn your keep, though, they wanted you to experiment. Do other things. Besides, when could you keep your hands off something as interesting and powerful and mysterious as the Tesseract? You figured out a way to siphon off a tiny fraction of its energy and keep it in a sealed-up vacuum tube. Even before Loki showed up with his gear, you had an idea that the Tesseract could power portals. 

On going through the portal Loki made, you spun out that tiny siphon of Tesseract energy. Spiked the hole with the idea that a tiny sliver of additional energy, released in just the right way, would destablize it. Change it. Either close it or, at the very least, shift it to another -- 

You stop falling, and you open your eyes. You're on your back, on concrete, in New York. For a moment, you think you must still be in space, but then, you realize that Steve Rogers is looking down at you. Why the hell would you dream about Steve Rogers when you were dying in space? You wouldn't, and you're about to ask him some questions about _where am I_ and _what universe is this_ and _did the Nazis win World War II?_ because if it turns out to be one of those universes where the Nazis won World War II, you are getting right the fuck out of here again. 

Then --

...

Then, you you hear a voice -- laughing, crying, trying to do both at the same time. She doesn't trust herself to laugh because she'll start crying, and vice versa. She is almost incoherent. 

"-- twelve," she says, and it sounds like the call came through mid-word for her. She actually makes this little snorting noise because she can't decide whether to laugh or cry and wants to do both and neither of them at the same time. " -- you called, you called me right as you were going through, and I was so worried, and they were showing you on TV. I swear, if you ever do that to me again, there won't even be 12% of you for the bomb to kill. I love you." 

"Tony?" she says, after a moment when you can't say anything. 

"Tony?"

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The AU where Pepper dies hitting the arc reactor button is from [this fic](http://quigonejinn.dreamwidth.org/120120.html) an embarrassingly long amount of time ago.  
> 2\. [Destronomics](http://archiveofourown.org/users/destronomics/pseuds/destronomics) had the idea to expand it into a full-on universe of keysmashing delight. And by delight, I mean sadness.  
> 3\. I don't know what happens after this. Destronomics wants Tony to pretend he's the one from this universe; I want a lot of sad Tony talking to Pepper in a SHIELD interrogation room and Pepper realizing, with this sort of little jet of horror, that Tony is a much better person in the world where she died miserable and hard and that a lot of people are alive in that universe because Tony is a better person. This is what and who we are.


End file.
